SIP

To be more fair, at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Cisco, AvayaNortel and Siemens voice systems will all be replaced by Alcatel in a $300 million deal that seems more like a service provider network than one needed for your typical medical needs. The deal is France-based Alcatel's largest enterprise transaction in North America, and will involve the retirement of thousands of Cisco switches and routers, hundreds of PBX systems, and thousands of digital phones from Avaya, Nortel, Siemens and other vendors. In doing this, the medical center will consolidate more than 150 standalone PBX phone systems into two redundant data centers, while boosting its core bandwidth by a factor of 10.

"It's pretty big," says Bill Hanna, vice president of IT infrastructure at UPMC. "The long and short of it is that the Cisco infrastructure will be replaced with an Alcatel infrastructure."

Analysts quoted in this article think this could be a defining moment for Alcatel who can now become a serious player in the enterprise space.

The word on the street is that approximately 50 people (see update) were laid off at Cantata yesterday out of a workforce of 300. Most of the people who were let go are shocked. Sources tell me the reason for the layoffs are soft sales numbers and some speculate the company is facing increased competition in its Excel Switching line. Apparently competitors are providing lower cost solutions.

Tom has done it again with his review of the Linksys CIT30 Phone for Yahoo! Messenger. My take on this nifty new gadget is it is great but. But what you ask? How can such a cool new sleek device with built in presence and the ability to connect with all your Yahoo!

Vector Capital and former Inter-Tel CEO Steven Mihaylo said they withdraw their bid for Inter-Tel. Recently Inter-Tel shareholders rejected the takeover proposal. 11,272,46 shares were voted against the Mihaylo Resolution, representing slightly over 50% of the 22,524,535 shares of the Company's common stock that were represented in person or by proxy.

Stockholders who voted, other than Mihaylo, rejected the resolution by approximately a two to one margin. This is obviously a very substantial number. Mihaylo owns approximately 19.4% of Inter-Tel's outstanding common shares.

Personally I think current management at the company is doing a good job and it would seem shareholders agree.

Some of the most complicated, acronym laden conversations I get into are with the people behind the protocols of VoIP. Actually the testing companies too can give you some mind-bending info on how you can mix the science of protocols while determining jitter levels that can affect voice quality.

But I digress. I really wanted to talk a bit about the recent SIPit event and more specifically that there have been 19 of these so far. Data Connection was a participant in the last event which was hosted by the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory.

According to Jonathon Cumming of Data Connection, the event was great as it allowed the company to test interoperability with the IPv6 implementation of their DC-SIP its carrier grade protocol stack.